Betty Edwards (born 1926 in
San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of Ca ...
,
California
California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...
) is an American
art teacher
Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas.
There is no generally agreed definition of wha ...
and author best known for her 1979 book ''Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'' (, in its 4th edition).
She taught and did research at the
California State University
The California State University (Cal State or CSU) is a public university system in California. With 23 campuses and eight off-campus centers enrolling 485,550 students with 55,909 faculty and staff, CSU is the largest four-year public univers ...
, Long Beach, until she retired in the late 1990s. While there, she founded the Center for the Educational Applications of Brain Hemisphere Research.
Professional life
She received a Bachelor's in Art from the
University of California, Los Angeles
The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) is a public land-grant research university in Los Angeles, California. UCLA's academic roots were established in 1881 as a teachers college then known as the southern branch of the California St ...
(UCLA, 1947), a Master's of Art from California State University, Northridge, and a Doctorate in Art, Education, and Psychology from UCLA (1976).
''Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain'' has remained the dominant book on its subject, used as a standard text in many art schools, and has been translated and published in many foreign languages, including French, Spanish, German, Polish, Hungarian, Chinese, and Japanese. Her company, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, develops special drawing tools, materials, and videos to help individuals learn to draw.
An artist and painter, she taught at high school level in the Los Angeles public school district (
Venice High School), then at community college, and from 1978 until her retirement in 1991, in the Art Department at California State University, Long Beach. All of her teaching experience has been in art: drawing, painting, art history, art-teacher training, and color theory. In addition to teaching drawing workshops around the world, she has also done business consulting with major national and international corporations to enhance creative problem solving.
Theories on drawing and brain function
Edwards's method of drawing and teaching was revolutionary when she published it in 1979. It received an immediate positive response, and is now widely accepted by artists, teachers, and others around the world. Underlying the method is the notion that the brain has two ways of perceiving and processing reality – one verbal and analytic, the other visual and perceptual. Edwards' method advocates suppressing the former in favor of the latter. It focuses on disregarding preconceived notions of what the drawn object should look like, and on individually "seeing".
Drawing, says Edwards, has five component skills of perception and drawing:
* Edges and lines (includes copying drawings and
contour drawing
Contour drawing is an art technique in which the artist sketches the style of the subject by drawing lines that result in a drawing that is essentially an outline (the French word meaning "outline"). The purpose of contour drawing is to empha ...
exercises)
* Negative space (i.e. space between items)
* Relationships (i.e. perspective and proportion between things)
* Light and shadows (shading)
* The whole: ''
gestalt
Gestalt may refer to:
Psychology
* Gestalt psychology, a school of psychology
* Gestalt therapy, a form of psychotherapy
* Bender Visual-Motor Gestalt Test, an assessment of development disorders
* Gestalt Practice, a practice of self-exploration ...
'' which emerges as the first four are taught
Then there are two additional skills, numbers 6 and 7:
[Edwards, p. 250–252}]
* Drawing from memory
* Drawing from imagination
Edwards's early work was based in part on her understanding of
neuroscience
Neuroscience is the scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, anatomy, molecular biology, development ...
, especially the
cerebral hemisphere research which suggested that the two hemispheres of the brain have different functions. To avoid the so-called "location controversy" (how the two major cognitive functions are distributed in the individual brain depending on handedness and other factors), she termed the modes "L-mode" and "R-mode." These designations appeared in the original 1979 edition of "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain." She described L-mode as basically a verbal, analytic, sequential mode of thinking, and R-mode as basically visual, perceptual, and global.
Bibliography
Edwards' major publications include:
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See also
*
Dual-coding theory Dual-coding theory, a theory of cognition, was hypothesized by Allan Paivio of the University of Western Ontario in 1971. In developing this theory, Paivio used the idea that the formation of mental images aids learning. According to Paivio, there ...
*
Functional specialization (brain)
In neuroscience, functional specialization is a theory which suggests that different areas in the brain are specialized for different functions.Flourens, M. J. P. (1824) Recherces experimentales sur les propretes et les fonctions du systeme ne ...
*
Lateralization of brain function
The lateralization of brain function is the tendency for some neural functions or cognitive processes to be specialized to one side of the brain or the other. The median longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebra ...
*
Roger Sperry
Roger Wolcott Sperry (August 20, 1913 – April 17, 1994) was an American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist, cognitive neuroscientist, and Nobel laureate who, together with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize i ...
*
Split-brain
Split-brain or callosal syndrome is a type of disconnection syndrome when the corpus callosum connecting the two hemispheres of the brain is severed to some degree. It is an association of symptoms produced by disruption of, or interference wit ...
References
External links
Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Edwards, Betty
1926 births
Living people
Artists from California
American women illustrators
American illustrators
American art educators
21st-century American women